Midsummer eve had come, bringing deep verdure to the forest, and roses in her lap, of a more vivid hue than the tender buds of Spring. But May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all the year round at Merry Mount, sporting with the Summer months, and revelling with Autumn, and basking in the glow of Winter's fireside. Through a world of toil and care she flitted with a dreamlike smile, and came hither to find a home among the lightsome hearts of Merry Mount.
There is a world that lies between the furrowed tameness of the agricultural field and the foreboding darkness of the forest wilderness. This is what scientists have termed the ecotone. It is the boundary between the forest and the field. A liminal place of change from the familiar and tame, to the wild and foreign. It straddles our imagination as that bizarre place that contains the suffering of brambles and the fecundity of fruit and vegetation, which therefore must be especially blessed with the gifts of Pomona and Flora.
To traverse this precinct of change is to experience the transition from one world to the next. To travel through the light of the meadow to the dimness of the forest we must pass through this threshold. The forest contains the terrors of the unknown, while the meadow embraces the safety of home. In between home and the unknown lies this magical space that is neither forest or field but holds the sanctuary of one and the trials of the other. It is a place of opposites. A place where superstitions arise, and the otherworld may be glimpsed.
Most of the life that calls this liminal area home has been deemed by humans to possess some form of special energy that can benefit mankind if the trick to harness it is known. Their ability to traverse or thrive in the world of the known and the unknown must take a special ability. Some may call it magic. Some may call it blessing from the gods. Whatever the quality may be, there is something both benevolent and profane about the living things that call this place, that is neither here nor there, home.
One small tree of the ecotone which has taken on a multitude of folklore and beliefs is the hawthorn (Crataegus sp.). The scientific name Crataegus is derived from the Greek kratos, referring to the strength of the wood, and akis which translates to sharp, alluding to the thorns that grow on many species. It is the thorns of this tree that have captured the human imagination for their wickedness and their utility. The thorns of some varieties can be quite vicious in size and sharpness, a feature that has caused the hawthorn to be cultivated as a property boundary for livestock and humans, to keep the one in and the other out. The thorns have also given the hawthorn the reputation for being a protective agent. Not only does the tree have the practical agricultural use of keeping livestock contained, but in their thorny branches birds find protection for their nests from predators. The thorns are an evolutionary advantage for the tree because browsing mammals find them a painful experience to their noses and lips and avoid eating the leaves or fruit of the tree, leaving the fruit free for the birds to consume or the nimble fingers of humans to pick.
This idea of protection spills over into sympathetic magic, where to grow a hawthorn near your door, or keep a branch over the transom would protect the house from evil. It is said the demons of adversity would be kept from entering such a protected house by being distracted by the wickedness of the thorns and compelled to stop and count their number. This counting would send the demons into spasmodic delight as they revel in all of the ways that these thorns could cause suffering to mankind, and therefore forget to enter the house proper.
The fruit of the hawthorn is a small pome like an apple, although it has a berry-like appearance. These bright red or orange fruits ripen in clusters that follow the pattern of the umbels of the flowers. They persist well into winter. Birds will eat them, but squirrels tend to leave them until all of the more favored food has been depleted. Humans find them a bit small to consume out of hand but they can be processed into jam or sauce.
It is the fruit, often called a haw, which gives the hawthorn half of its name. Haw is derived from the Dutch haag, and the Old English term haga, both of which carry the meaning of “hedge.” But it cannot be denied that it also bears a strong similarity to the pronunciation of “hag.” A hag being defined as an older woman without living relatives who has outlived her usefulness as a productive addition to the community. As such, she would have been banished to live on the edges or borders of the town. She would often be considered by the populace a witch with negative associations to reinforce her being ostracized from society. As a person who became part of the mysterious and superstitious netherworld of the in-between places, these old woman would also, in the imaginations of the population, take on the supposed magic and mystery of these places, which added to their diabolical reputations. Her ability to survive would be contingent on her foraging and self-sufficiency. Her ability to thrive without the support of the larger population would also be considered a marvel adding to her other worldly qualities. As a forager of the hawthorn, it would be difficult to determine if the tree derived its name from the hag or the hag was named for the tree, either way she would be considered a denizen of the hedge, a place for an individual that belongs to no place.
An additional power attributed to the hawthorn tree is its association with its assumed masculinity and its erotic nature. The flowers of the Hawthorn tree bloom at the beginning of May, usually during the time of Celtic Beltane. Beltane is an agricultural celebration that happens at the midpoint between the spring and summer solstices. These days are called cross quarter days since they divide the four quarter seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter into a further four notable days of celebration.
Beltane is considered the ancient beginning of summer. These are three days set aside after the work of the plowing and planting are over to encourage and bless the sprouted seed and protect it during its growth to ensure a bountiful harvest. It is the time of the year that marks the end of the unsettled weather of spring and welcomes the calm, long, and steadily warm days of summer. It is essentially a fertility celebration that employs sex magic to keep the earth fecund.
The hawthorn tree happens to bloom just about the time of Beltane. It may in fact signal the start of the celebration although the information for that is uncertain. What is certain is that the hawthorn became essential to the summer celebration. In the Gregorian calendar, May 1 was set aside as the first day of summer. This may or may not coincide with the blooming of the hawthorn in modern times, which may be some evidence that pagans may have waited for the certainty of the blooms before determining their celebrations.
Hawthorn flowers have a distinctive odor that resembles human semen. This fragrance and its association with masculine sex has set this small tree apart in the imaginations of agricultural celebrants. Many traditions have developed around the supposed masculinity of the tree and the need for the fertility of the earth and the insurance of a bountiful harvest. This has led to much phallic symbolism and to male dominated sex magic, for to plow and to sow are masculine acts, while sprouting seed and growth are feminine actions as the result of plowing and sowing.
The most enduring of these pagan traditions has been the maypole. Initially the maypole was born out of dancing around the flowering hawthorn tree proper, which would end in an orgiastic celebration of sex that would consecrate the earth and render the fields fertile enough to produce an ample harvest that would stave off starvation. There would be bonfires to cleanse and renew, since fire has since the beginning of human history been associated with purification because it consumes and transforms what it touches. There is also the association of fire with human sexual intercourse because fire is obtained not only by friction, but also the use of a hand drill to produce the ember to start a fire mimics the active and passive principle of sex. The participants of the maypole dance would have to jump over or through the bonfire to purify themselves to be eligible to take part. In this celebration, the hawthorn tree as the vertical member represents the phallus and all of the life that springs from that source. And only the men who have the courage to brave the purifying flame will have shown their prowess to participate in the sex magic under the tree.
Another tradition was to choose a May Queen. This was usually a young woman of marrying age who was still untouched by a man. The men would compete for the favors of the May Queen by going into the forest on the night before the summer festival to search for the mayflower or the bloom of the hawthorn. The first male to find and return to the village with a flowering branch of hawthorn won the right to take the maiden’s hand, either for the duration of the festival or for life as each individual community would decide.
An alternative ritual was for young unmarried men and women to disappear into the forest on the night before the summer holiday. In this tradition, the youth were expected to find each other in the darkness and consummate their union. Any children that may result of these liaisons were considered good omens for a generous fall yield from the fields. In the morning, they were also expected to be carrying mayflower branches to show that they had been successful in their nocturnal adventures.
The correlation with the phallus and masculine sexuality waned when the maypole was eventually substituted for the Maytree as a more convenient and accessible alternative during beginning of summer festivals. This change was implemented when the Gregorian calendar was substituted for the various agrarian methods of telling time. Illiterate farmers often used a lunar system and or a visual system to tell when the time was right for annual activities, timing planting or harvesting by the phases of the moon or by visual cues in the environment. This changed when the Catholic Church enforced the Gregorian Calendar (named for Pope Gregory XIII who deemed it necessary and commissioned it) on the Western world. The Gregorian Calendar is based on solar astronomical movements. The Gregorian Calendar was similar to the Julian Calendar that was in use before it, except that the Julian calendar (put in place by Julius Caesar and used in Europe for 1,600 years) rounded out of the solar year to 365.25 days. This rounding out caused a drift in the days, causing a gain in one day every 129 years. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar was calculated to correct this drift – mainly because the calculated date of the Spring Equinox needed to be set as March 21 (in actuality the Equinox varies yearly by three days between March 19 – 21) as it was calculated that that date contained an equal number of hours of daylight and darkness. At the time of Pope Gregory’s recalibration, the solstice was drifting to about ten days prior. This date was important to the Catholic Church, since it was used to calculate the celebration of Easter, the holiest day of the Catholic year. Once the Church reset the calendar, the blooming of the hawthorn tree could no longer be counted on to occur at the proper time as the summer festivals were now fixed on May 1 as the midpoint between the solstices. This required a more reliable alternative to the hawthorn tree and the maypole was created as a stand-in. The maypole gradually became merely a fixed point for chaste circular dances.
Of course, once the Catholic Church became involved the pagan festivals were tamed. The sex magic was regarded as improper, heathen, and inspired by Satan. As long as the celebrations were kept to a certain decorum, the Catholic Church was wont to look the other way in certain local matters. In England, it was the Puritans that would tolerate none of these pagan and profane festivities. They put all of the merry making debauchery to a halt by 1645 when they took control after the English Civil War.
The hawthorn tree itself became sanctified and Christianized as the tree which provided the crown of thorns for Christ (no matter that this is a tree of temperate climates that would not thrive in the climate of the Middle East where Christ lived and taught.) As the supposed source of Christ’s crown of thorns, its symbolism was modified to one of piety and Christian suffering. In Catholic countries May became a month-long devotion to the Virgin Mary who as the virgin Mother of the Son of God, replaced and absorbed the aspects of the ancient goddess of spring, Flora who represented purity, beauty, and fertility. The practice to empathize Mary’s role in Christian faith was begun in the 13th century monastic communities. It gradually spread throughout Europe with the empowerment of the Catholic Church and the rise of evangelical initiatives to convert pagan cultures.
Humans have a great ability to imbue the world around them with special powers. Often there is a correspondence detected in something that incites the human imagination into the belief that because a certain feature in one thing is similar to another human feature, then the conclusion would be that the one is related to the other. So, it was with the hawthorn tree. As the tree protects itself with thorns, so those thorns will protect my property and myself from evil. The thorns, given the discomfort and wounds they inflict follows a certain logic. It is when the odor of the flowers arouse certain abstract thoughts, that the associations become more convoluted. Hawthorn flowers to humans smell like semen, the male contribution to new life. Because of this correspondence, cultures where this tree flourishes have invented phallic and masculine sex fantasies around this unassuming tree. Hawthorn’s association with sex became so entrenched in the psychology of the subconscious in some temperate cultures, that long after the agrarian sex magic became forgotten, it was still taboo to bring hawthorn flowers into the home because to do so was to invite evil in. The evil was the prudishly unspoken inuendo of sexual arousal. The scent of the flowers might invite improper thoughts to those susceptible.
A place that is considered a passage from one place to another whether it be a hearth, a doorway, a crossroads, or the ecotone can be a place of magic. These areas where it is difficult to ascertain where in the physical geography they can be placed fuel the human imagination with possibilities. They are always locations where fate has some intervention. At a crossroads, choosing a direction dictates the course of your entire life. A fireplace is a place of transformation that needs constant vigilance lest the power get out of control. A threshold marks the transition from one space to another, from one world to another, each separate and distinct from the another. What happens in one room may be totally different than what happens in another. Inside is a far different experience than outside.
The ecotone is a special place of transition. It marks a boundary that eases you from tame to wild. The life that lives there has special powers as befits the transitive state. Humans saw this transition as magic. It envisioned the life in the liminal space as a portal to another world. To sleep under a hawthorn tree is to invite the opening passage into the supernatural otherworld. If the power of transition could be tapped into, perhaps the special magic could be used for the benefit of humankind. The hawthorn was singled out because it offered very sensual clues to its magic. The people used it the best way they could devise to keep the community alive and flourishing and keep famine and death at bay.
Arthur Bruso © 2024
Header photograph of hawthorn flowers and ending photograph of a hawthorn tree in situ by Arthur Bruso © 2024
#arthurbruso #arthurbrusowriter #arthurbrusoessay #essay #whatiamlookingatessay #nathanialhawthorne #maypoleofmerrymount #ecotone #pomona #flora #forest #meadow #otherworld #hawthorn #crataegus #thorns #sympatheticmagic #demons #pome #hag #forager #hedge #hedgewitch #beltane #summer #gregoriancalendar #semen #phallic #maypole #sexmagic #fire #mayqueen #popegregoryxiii #juliancalendar #juliuscaesar #pagan #puritan #englishcivilwar #crownofthorns #mary #monasticcommunities #crossroads #hearth #threshold
Comments